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Exploring the art and craft of storyFri, 31 Jul 2015 21:41:37 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3With standalone site Esquire Classics, the magazine invites readers to step back in time with archived storieshttp://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/with-standalone-site-esquire-classics-the-magazine-invites-readers-to-step-back-in-time-with-archived-stories/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/with-standalone-site-esquire-classics-the-magazine-invites-readers-to-step-back-in-time-with-archived-stories/#commentsFri, 31 Jul 2015 21:41:37 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=120903Since it debuted in 1933, Esquire has helped launch and promote the careers of dozens of renowned writers, from Raymond Carver and Richard Ford to Cynthia Ozick and Elizabeth Gilbert. Under the leadership of Harold Hayes and fiction editor Gordon Lish, nicknamed “Captain Fiction,” in the 1960s and 1970s, the magazine heralded the New Journalism movement with stories by Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Gay Talese (including his “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” perhaps the most famous piece of magazine journalism ever penned).

Now, many of those iconic works, as well as more contemporary pieces, are showcased in full–with new introductions and artwork–on the magazine’s new website, Esquire Classics, which launched in March. Here’s a sampling of the diverse stories featured recently: a discourse on the importance of fiction, by E.L. Doctorow, from 1986; Richard Ben Cramer’s famous piece, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?”; former war correspondent Michael Herr’s “Hell Sucks,” which he wrote in Vietnam; and an essay by Nora Ephron, “A Few Words About Breasts,” originally published in her Esquire column in 1972. The archived works are available on the site at no cost, and advertisement-free, and the full text of the single article posted each week is also sent out in a weekly email to subscribers.

What Esquire’s plans for the standalone site are, that’s not clear–promotion has been rather minimal–but it’s likely the magazine hopes to attract new readers and draw traffic online with the archived materials. Soon, the site will include “The Esquire Cover to Cover Archive,” which will include every single issue from 1933 through the present, and this summer, Esquire Classics is also re-publishing one short story per week, with works by John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, and Saul Bellow already in the mix.

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/with-standalone-site-esquire-classics-the-magazine-invites-readers-to-step-back-in-time-with-archived-stories/feed/0The Narrative Appeal of Documentary Theaterhttp://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/the-narrative-appeal-of-documentary-theater/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/the-narrative-appeal-of-documentary-theater/#commentsWed, 29 Jul 2015 18:52:01 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=120859The day Molly Ivins died in 2007, Margaret Engel called up her twin sister Allison and told her they had to write a play about the wisecracking Texas political columnist who stuck George W. Bush with the nickname “Shrub.”

No matter that the Engels were journalists who had never before ventured into drama. They were theater lovers from way back, and a one-woman show felt to them like the right form for a tribute. For Ivins’s fans, it would be a less solitary activity than reading her words on the page. Each performance would be a communal experience of listening once more to her voice, channeled through the actress playing her.

When “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins” premiered in 2010 at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, Kathleen Turner was the star. The show has since been performed, by Turner and others, all over the country, and the Engels are now working on two more plays: one about Erma Bombeck, due to debut in October at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., the other about Damon Runyon. Both new plays were spurred by requests from the subjects’ representatives.

After years as newspaper reporters—Margaret, a former managing editor of the Newseum who also worked at The Washington Post; Allison, who got an MFA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California in 2009 and also worked at the San Jose Mercury News—the move into playwriting often surprises fellow journalists. They act “like we discovered nuclear fusion in our basement or something,” Allison says. But, she argues, writing for the stage isn’t really so different from writing for a newspaper: “You’re telling a narrative.” Indeed, the elements of journalistic excellence—research, reporting, storytelling—are also essential to writing for the stage.

Certainly, there’s plenty of precedent. J.M. Barrie, the playwright who gave the world “Peter Pan,” started out as a journalist. A Chicago Tribune crime reporter, Maurine Dallas Watkins, wrote the 1926 play “Chicago,” which Kander and Ebb spun into their gritty, glamorous hit musical. George Bernard Shaw, famous for his plays and politics, made his first literary ripples as a critic. Marivaux, the 18th-century French dramatist; Mary Chase, who wrote “Harvey”; Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who penned the classic comedy of newspapering, “The Front Page”—all journalists. Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, and David Rabe were, too, long ago.

These days, the traditional route to a playwriting career in America involves getting into a top drama school, an approach that also worked for Watkins, who wrote “Chicago” as part of the first class of graduate drama students at Yale. But the Engels are hardly alone among contemporary veteran journalists writing for the theater. It helps that—perhaps ever since writer-performer Anna Deavere Smith’s landmark “Fires in the Mirror,” an interview-based solo piece about the Crown Heights riots, in 1992—the stage has become not just hospitable to but hungry for documentary theater, often political in nature, and other work rooted in the real world.

The Tectonic Theater Project journeyed to Wyoming a month after the 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard and shaped its Off Broadway hit “The Laramie Project” (2000) from company members’ interviews with locals, then returned for a follow-up a decade later. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen made “The Exonerated” (2002) out of their interviews with wrongly convicted former death-row inmates. “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” (2005), about a young American peace protester killed in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer, takes its text from her diaries and e-mails, edited by Alan Rickman and the Guardian’s new editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. The list is long and getting longer. “There’s always been theater looking at current events in a very direct way, in an almost nonfictional way, but I think it’s really taken off in the last 20 years,” says Peter Marks, chief drama critic at The Washington Post.

"Red Hot Patriot," about the late columnist Molly Ivins, is a tribute by two journalists
Mark Gavin/Philadelphia Theatre Company

Even as playwrights have borrowed techniques from journalism to create such work, journalists have recognized an opportunity to transfer their well-honed skills to a different medium. Lawrence Wright, the New Yorker magazine staff writer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” has been writing plays since the early 1980s. Wright, whose most recent play, “Camp David,” premiered in 2014 at Arena Stage, credits “Fires in the Mirror” with changing his idea of what drama could do when he saw Smith perform it at New York’s Public Theater. “I was riveted by the notion that you could marry journalism and theater,” he says. “I didn’t know that that was possible.”

When Wright finally tried fusing the two forms, it was partly in reaction to a favor the playwright David Hare asked of him when Hare was working on a piece about Jerusalem in the late 1990s. “He wanted to use a line that I had written in The New Yorker about Jerusalem, and he wound up not using it, but I got jealous,” Wright recalls. “I thought, you know, ‘I know a lot more about Jerusalem than he does, and he gets to do this one-man show.’”

That envy eventually nudged him to create his own well-received solo piece, “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” which premiered Off Broadway at the Culture Project in 2007. Intended as a response to questions he kept getting about his experiences reporting on terrorism, the performance wasn’t so different from journalism at its most primitive, he says: “If you imagine a bunch of Neanderthals are sitting around and wondering what’s over the next hill, and one of them volunteers to go and then comes back and stands in front of the campfire and tells them what he saw, well, that’s a lot like standing on the stage and telling people what you saw when you went to visit Al-Qaeda or you went to visit Hamas.”

Marks, who called the show “a first-rate piece of theater,” reached to a less distant past for a comparison: “It was almost a throwback to the days when explorers used to go around the world and come back to New York and give a lecture on what they found, and people would be kind of mesmerized.”

There’s always been theater that looks at current events but it has really taken off in the last 20 years

PLAY TIMEA sampling of plays by journalists and based on true events1913
“Pygmalion,” George Bernard Shaw
A basis for “My Fair Lady,” which lampoons Britain’s class system via lessons in speech refinement1926
“Chicago,” Maurine Dallas Watkins
Watkins gleaned material from cases involving female murder suspects she covered as a reporter1928
“The Front Page,” Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur
Tabloid newspaper reporters take on the police beat1971
“Sticks and Bones,” David Rabe
A black comedy about a blind Vietnam war veteran1977
“Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” Tom Stoppard
Set in the USSR, a criticism of the Soviet practice of treating political dissidence as a form of mental illness2002
“The Guys,” Anne Nelson
A fictionalized account of Nelson’s experiences ghostwriting eulogies for firefighters in the wake of 9/112003
“Democracy,” Michael Frayn
An examination of the Guillaume Affair, an espionage scandal that rocked Cold War Germany2005
“My Name is Rachel Corrie,” edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner
Based on the diaries and e-mails of Corrie, who was killed by an IDF bulldozer while protesting the destruction of a house in the Gaza Strip2007
“The Accomplices,” Bernard Weinraub
Historical drama suggesting that the FDR administration failed to do everything it could to rescue European Jews during World War II2010
“Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins,” Margaret and Allison Engel
A staged celebration of the liberal Texan columnist and the glories of the First Amendment2014
“Camp David,” Lawrence Wright
Explores the 13 grueling days of the 1978 Mideast Peace Talks

Anne Nelson wasn’t looking to write a play in the days after September 11, 2001, but she was feeling “utterly stymied” as a writer. A former war correspondent in Central America who had transitioned into academia in New York, she was surrounded by a huge, unfolding story—and watching the international students she oversaw at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism report it for news outlets back home. She didn’t have a way to contribute to the coverage.

Then Nelson met a fire department captain who needed help crafting eulogies for the men he’d lost at the World Trade Center. Coaxing out of him the details of their lives, she wrote the tributes the captain would give and in the process found a September 11 story that would become her first play. “The Guys,” which she finished in nine days, premiered 12 weeks after the attack and was an instant hot ticket, starring Sigourney Weaver and Bill Murray at the tiny Flea Theater in Tribeca, not far from Ground Zero.

Based on Nelson’s experience with the fire captain, “The Guys” is a fictionalized account. At first, Nelson considered telling the story straight, in a magazine piece, but her shame at the behavior of other journalists—such as the television reporter who asked the grieving captain, on camera, how it felt to lose his best friend—checked that impulse.

Nelson wasn’t willing to intrude on the captain’s privacy, but she also knew she wouldn’t be able to shield his identity in a work of journalism. When she happened to sit next to Sigourney Weaver’s husband, the theater director Jim Simpson, at a dinner, “the wheels started turning,” Nelson recalls. “I said, ‘Oh! I can change anything I want to in a play.’”

That realization freed her to give “The Guys” a dramatic shape, unconstrained by the bounds of documentary. “I remember this moment, at like 2 o’clock in the morning, where I was writing and I said, ‘Oh my God, this is getting too dark. I think it needs a tango.’” So Nelson added an interlude where the lights dim, the music begins, and the captain and the editor dance.

Theater people talk a lot about dramatic truth, which is different from truth in the everyday sense: less about facts than about capturing an essence, even if that comes about by changing or obscuring facts. That’s what Nelson believes she was able to do with “The Guys,” which premiered at a time when hero worship of firefighters—maudlin press coverage included—was a post-9/11 norm. Her play, by contrast, conjures images of flawed, honorable, regular people who died on the job.

“I felt that in a lot of ways, it was more true than the journalism people were writing,” Nelson says. “Society needed heroes, and they needed to put the heroes on a pedestal, then whoever you put on a pedestal, you have to tear down. And all of these expectations were being imposed on them, and they were dazed by it, because it wasn’t who they were. And they came to this play and said, ‘Thank you. That’s who we are. We’re guys doing our job.’”

But for journalists-turned-playwrights, creativity can be the trickiest part—the element of theater that is most in conflict with their training. As Marks puts it, “‘Invention’ is a sacred word among playwrights, and it’s kind of kryptonite among journalists.”

So it was for Bernard Weinraub, who grew up reading plays and dreaming of a life as a playwright. He spent his career instead at The New York Times, but when he retired in 2005, he finally acted on the fantasy. A story he’d covered provided the seeds of his first play, “The Accomplices,” about what the United States government and the Jewish establishment in this country failed to do to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ben Hecht are among the 14 characters.

Having taken playwriting classes at New York University as a young man, and again, gearing up for retirement, at the University of California, Los Angeles, Weinraub understood the demands of drama: Conflict and tension are essential, which is not the case in a news story. Steeped in Hollywood—he covered it for the Times, and he is married to the producer Amy Pascal—he sympathizes with the makers of historically based movies, such as “Selma” director Ava DuVernay, who almost invariably get into some kind of trouble for reworking real-life events. Nonetheless, Weinraub’s conscience pricked whenever he deviated from reality in “The Accomplices,” which the New Group premiered Off Broadway in 2007.

“In the beginning, it can be a slightly awkward line to walk over, because you still want to deal with as many facts as you can,” he says. “You eventually realize you have a story to tell, and some of the details either have to be omitted or altered to make it a palatable two-hour film or play. But there’s a constant tension there—for journalists. It’s sort of a delicate balance, and you’re always feeling a little bit guilty if you’re making some changes. But then you realize, this is a drama, and I have no idea what X said to Y. You have to make up the dialogue.”

Wright had to do a bit of that, too, in “Camp David,” his play about the 1978 Israeli-Egyptian peace conference Jimmy Carter held at the Maryland presidential retreat. Much of the dialogue spoken by its four characters—Jimmy Carter, Rosalynn Carter, Menachem Begin, and Anwar Sadat—is taken from life, but not all of it. “When I’m going out on a limb and making stuff up, I wanted to make sure that it was true to their characters and true to their beliefs,” Wright says. “Jimmy Carter came on opening night. I doubt that he would have been able to tell, at least not very clearly, what he really said and what I imagined he said.”

Lawrence Wright took much of the dialogue in his “Camp David” from the 1978 peace talks
Teresa Wood/Arena Stage

The way Margaret Engel sees it, there’s a feeling in America that people must choose one field and stick with it. “If you are 23 years old and right out of drama school and wrote a play, that’s considered totally fine,” she says. “But if you switch from a different profession—if you’re a reporter and now are doing a play—there’s a big, how do I say this, skepticism of that. There’s not much tolerance for people multitasking.”

Playwriting provides plenty of unfamiliar challenges for journalists new to it: writing dialogue that comes alive when spoken aloud, drawing characters who seem like flesh-and-blood human beings, keeping the number of required actors low enough that a production budget wouldn’t be astronomical.

But journalism is good preparation for doing quick script rewrites and collaborating with directors. “If an editor tells you, ‘You gotta change the lede,’ you change the lede,” Weinraub says. “So if a director asked me to do something, nine times out of 10 I did it. I’m a very easy guy to work with as a playwright—maybe too easy.”

Journalists also tend to excel at research. Before the Engels wrote “Red Hot Patriot,” Margaret Engel ordered 51 solo plays from the publisher Samuel French Inc., and the sisters read them all. “That was a good introduction, because it really felt that it was doable,” she says. “We liked a lot of the plays, but some of them weren’t fabulous, and so we thought, ‘Well, we can at least meet that low bar.’”

Journalism is good preparation for doing quick script rewrites and collaborating with directors

Wright researches his plays the same way he does his books: extensive interviewing, voluminous reading. In fact, he spun his 2014 book, “Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David,” out of his research for “Camp David.” In “Thirteen Days,” he stuck to the rules of nonfiction; in “Camp David,” he laid invention on top of fact. “When I become deeply acquainted with the characters and I have a sense of what really happened,” he says, “the real things become the girders upon which I can build this abode, and then once I have those real things in place, I can go inside it and start imagining it.”

Imagination, according to Marks, is where many plays by journalists fall short, sometimes because the authors haven’t spent long enough learning “the tools of entertainment” that vital theater requires. If subjective observation and breadth of character are lacking, a play can feel too tethered to the page. “There’s a kind of flatness sometimes to plays by journalists because they’re basically interested in imparting information; that’s what we do,” he says. “The big picture of what turns this into meaningful drama, what makes this dramatic, is often the thing that falls away.”

As the Engels ready “Erma Bombeck: At Wit’s End” for its autumn opening, Margaret says she’d like to see even more theater based in journalism: “Journalists uncover amazing, spectacular stories always, and so much of it vanishes after the story is written. You don’t have to be making up wacky scenarios when true life shows you all the drama you could handle.”

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/the-narrative-appeal-of-documentary-theater/feed/0From Mayborn: The Pulitzer Effecthttp://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/from-mayborn-the-pulitzer-effect/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/from-mayborn-the-pulitzer-effect/#commentsFri, 24 Jul 2015 16:00:24 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=120830The final session of the 2015 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference served as a preview of next year’s theme.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prizes, the conference will focus on the awards and award-winners. Sunday’s final session featured The Dallas Morning News editorial page editor and Pulitzer Board member Keven Ann Willey, Washington Post managing editor Kevin Merida, Los Angeles Times reporter and Pulitzer-winner Ruben Vives and Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer-winner Carol Leonning.

The group talked about what it takes to win the prize and the effect of winning it on their work and their sources. Vives said that he’s still early in his career and hopes winning the award – for the Times’ Homicide Report – will lead to more big stories.

“The impact, the ripple effect, for our reputation is just astonishing,” Vives said. “People come to me. They trust me.”

Leonning said her sources in the Secret Service were just as thrilled about the award. They had wanted the story told for a long time, and “really believed President Obama was going to get killed.”

While she was still working on a story about a 2011 assassination attempt, a man jumped the White House fence, forcing her to publish her narrative project quickly and work with those same sources on deadline. She said if she hadn’t built those sources early, they wouldn’t have come to her during breaking news.

“It was so great luck, I had sources when I needed them,” Leonning said. “I know they were delighted to be heard.”

Merida and Willey talked about the behind-the-scenes process that happens between publication and the prize. Merida said his staff has a de-facto “contest wrangler” who goes through each department to find entry-worthy work. Editors debate which three pieces to enter in each contest.

The entries then go to the various juries for each category, which select the three finalists sent to the Pulitzer Board for final judging.

“It’s great to win the prize because it’s energizing to the newsroom,” Merida said. “It inspires people. It motivates them.”

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/from-mayborn-the-pulitzer-effect/feed/0From Mayborn: How to Develop Landscape as Characterhttp://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/from-mayborn-how-to-develop-landscape-as-character/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/from-mayborn-how-to-develop-landscape-as-character/#commentsWed, 22 Jul 2015 21:36:29 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=120827George Getschow, the tribal leader and founder of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, opened Sunday’s sessions by taking attendees to the Fulton Fish Market in New York, the Los Angeles County Courthouse and the Rio Grande in south Texas. Landscape and setting can play just as an important part in stories as the characters and actions, Getschow said. He pointed to examples from Melville, Steinbeck and a handful of journalists to show how great writers craft scenery. “Landscape and place are inextricably bound up with their characters,” Getschow said.

One of Getschow’s examples was Dan Barry’s 2005 story in The New York Times about the end of the Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan:

It smells of truck exhaust and fish guts. Of glistening skipjacks and smoldering cigarettes; fluke, salmon and Joe Tuna’s cigar. Of Canada, Florida, and the squid-ink East River. Of funny fish-talk riffs that end with profanities spat onto the mucky pavement, there to mix with coffee spills, beer blessings, and the flowing melt of sea-scented ice.

This fragrance of fish and man pinpoints one place in the New York vastness: a small stretch of South Street where peddlers have sung the song of the catch since at least 1831, while all around them, change. They were hawking fish here when an ale house called McSorley’s opened up; when a presidential aspirant named Lincoln spoke at Cooper Union; when the building of a bridge to Brooklyn ruined their upriver view.

Take it in now, if you wish, if you dare, because the rains will come to rinse this distinct aroma from the city air. Some Friday soon, perhaps next month, the fish sellers will spill their ice and shutter their stalls, pack their grappling hooks and raise a final toast beneath the ba-rump and hum of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive.

Getschow offered this checklist for developing landscape as a character:

What is the history of the place, and how does it affect the place today?

What is the economy of the place? How does money, or lack thereof, impact characters?

What do people wear in the place?

What do people eat in the place?

How do people speak to each other in the place?

What is the weather like?

What’s the religious landscape like? What do people believe?

What are the gestures people use? How do people greet each other?

Are people in the place superstitious? What superstitions do they believe?

What sensory details can you use to describe the place? What does it look like, what does it sound like, what does it smell like?

“Suddenly, the place becomes a character. A living, breathing character,” Getschow said. “That’s what we do as storytellers, we want them to experience what we’ve experienced.”

“This is indeed the panel when the white guy and the Asian guy talk about writing about race,” said Chris Vognar, culture critic at The Dallas Morning News and 2009 Nieman Fellow, when opening the panel.

Vognar led a conversation with Jeff Chang, director of Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts and author of Who We Be: The Colorization of America. The book covers what Chang calls, “the return of the culture wars.”

It was published just a few weeks before a grand jury in Ferguson, Mo., decided not to charge a police officer with killing Michael Brown, an unarmed young black man. Chang said he worked on the book at a time when he thought the country lacked a national conversation about race.

“I think the conversation changed dramatically because the #BlackLivesMatter movement,” he said. “It’s a very difficult thing to get at and there’s a defensiveness to it.”

Both writers said that reader backlash on stories about race can be especially intense. Chang said that after the violence in Ferguson, attention about his book turned to hateful discourse on social media.

“People took the time to write hate postcards,” Chang said.

“That’s thoughtful,” Vognar said.

“Yeah, ‘Wish you weren’t here!’” Chang said.

Chang did say, however, that social media can have the power to bring attention to under-reported stories.

“Without social media, we wouldn’t know who Sandra Bland was. Without social media, we wouldn’t know who Trayvon Martin was,” Chang said. “Out of that change happens.”

At the end of the panel, Vognar steered the conversation toward writing craft, asking Chang how he develops source relationships in neighborhoods and environments he’s not directly a part of – like the hip-hop scene in New York City.

“In order to really be there, I had to really show up,” Chang said. “Ultimately it’s not just about showing up, it’s about returning.”

It’s a give-and-take, he said, between reporting everything a source tells you and knowing which stories are part of a culture’s “sacred knowledge” and should be kept out of publication.

“The work that I’m interested in is to explore stories that haven’t been told in order to shed light, to obviously work my craft … but also, straight up and frankly, change things,” he said. “In that regard, if you have to weight a story versus a relationship you’re building, the relationship will always win.”

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/from-mayborn-the-craft-of-covering-race/feed/0From Mayborn: How Video Can Improve Narrativehttp://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/from-mayborn-how-video-can-improve-narrative/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/from-mayborn-how-video-can-improve-narrative/#commentsMon, 20 Jul 2015 20:44:29 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=120803Dan Barry said a 90-word wire report from rural Iowa was the spark of what became his 2014 story “The ‘Boys’ in the Bunkhouse.’”

Thirty men with intellectual disabilities in a schoolhouse on a hilltop being paid $65 each month to kill turkeys for 35 years.

“That series of images jumped out at me,” Barry said. “I think in terms of cinema. I think in terms of scenery.”

The Pulitzer-winning writer of the This Land column in The New York Times spoke Saturday at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference with fellow Times staffer Kassie Bracken. Bracken is a videographer who has collaborated with Barry on many of his reports.

The two presented a series of case studies and video examples about how visual journalism – specifically video – can help improve narrative writing.

“I learned long ago not to say, ‘This is my photographer,’” Barry said. “The way to do it is respect the discipline … but respect the power of those disciplines to dramatically raise the game.”

When on assignment, Barry and Bracken will many times negotiate with each other how to structure interviews and reporting days. If they split up during the day, Barry said they meet in the evenings and debrief each other, so both reporters stay on top of a story as it develops.

“I’m looking for different things than Dan is,” Bracken said. “As a video person you’re not a gatherer, you’re a hunter.”

Barry and Bracken said they both approach sources without notebook or camera when beginning their reporting. They’ll visit a source many times to earn trust and make sure the subject is comfortable with the scrutiny of a reporter.

Bracken said she specifically makes sure that sources know what they’re getting into before they begin shooting. She’ll tell a potential subject what she plans to shoot, how much time it will take and why she wants to get the shots she works for.

“You gain trust by just being there. Not imposing yourself, but being available. You have to spend the time,” Barry said. “Then the notebook comes out and the stories come to you.”

At the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, Hannan discussed his 2014 Grantland story that sparked national controversy and discussion about transgender portrayal in the media. In a session about mistakes ranging from Stephen Glass to Rolling Stone, Hannan’s story dominated the conversation.

Other panelists were S.I. Rosenbaum, senior editor at Boston Magazine and one of the most vocal critics of Hannan’s story, and Slate’s Hanna Rosin, who worked alongside Glass at The New Republic and interviewed the writer of a recently discredited story in Rolling Stone about a gang rape.

Reporting for Grantland, Hannan researched the creator of a supposedly scientifically superior putter — a woman who went by Dr. V. In the eight months of reporting, he found out that she had lied about her academic resume and was transgender.

In October 2013, Dr. V took her own life. The story ran the next January.

“Did you have a sense she was unstable?” Rosenbaum asked Hannan on Saturday.

“Yes,” he said.

Hannan said he and his wife had multiple conversations about V’s instability. They had a friend of the family who took their own life earlier that year, yet at every chance to drop the story, Hannan felt — at the time — justified in his reporting.

“My wife brought it up whenever she could,” he said. “There’s a momentum to a story that’s hard to stop.”

He also said he regretted that he and Grantland editors didn’t take the time to restructure the story after Dr. V’s suicide. He filed his first draft months before, and never altered the basic outline.

There were many times when Hannan had concerns, he said. When a freelance fact-checker was worried Dr. V may hurt herself, Hannan said he was “scared shitless,” but that he and his editors were “lulled into a sense of, this is a con-artist first and a transgender woman second.”

“The bones of that draft barely changed. That narrative draft barely changed,” Hannan said. “Everybody in this room has had the feeling of just, ‘get this out,’ which is the last feeling you should have.”

Rosenbaum re-edited the story after the controversy started, a version which avoided the fact that Dr. V was transgender. Rosenbaum said it was partially the fault of editors who didn’t have the right kind of experience to properly address trans issues.

The Riveter's second issue was published in summer 2014, and its third issue is set to publish this fall.
Photo courtesy of The Riveter

The two journalism students didn’t let their awe at meeting Esquire writer Mike Sager silence their frustration: Why weren’t there more women in his collection of the “next generation” of literary journalists?

Sager’s response, in essence: You tell me.

Two years on from that exchange, Kaylen Ralph and Joanna Demkiewicz find themselves running a small but gutsy magazine by, about and for women: The Riveter. Their venture is fueled by crowdfunding and income from day jobs, and stoked by the question: Is there a future for women in longform journalism? It also is an act of defiance at a time when larger industry trends that say longform journalism is a luxury of the past, print is dying, and women’s magazines are defined more by fluff and fashion than serious storytelling.

When The Riveter launched in 2013, its motto was “longform journalism by women for everyone,” says Demkiewicz, one of the magazine’s founders. It has since shed that ambiguous stance to embrace a target audience of women, ages 23-40, and a mantra of “unapologetically feminine.” “In the beginning, we didn’t call ourselves a women’s magazine because we were afraid, honestly,” Demkiewicz says. “I’ll openly read Esquire, but a man doesn’t usually pull out Marie Claire on the subway. Now, we want to be very unapologetic about what it means to be a woman, and our content reflects that.”

The Riveter has beaten the early odds against start-ups, and its founders are now focusing on a way to sustain those efforts. This past March they raised $35,815 in a Kickstarter campaign designed to build a subscription base. With that funding, the magazine will print about 1,000 copies of its third issue this September and will publish quarterly next year, giving The Riveter team time to build a strategy to survive beyond that.

In the second print issue of The Riveter, ESPN cricket correspondent Firdose Moonda offers a historical narrative about the Africanization of Johannesburg’s inner city.
Theresa Berens

But before The Riveter was making waves, Ralph and Demkiewicz were students at the University of Missouri School of Journalism attending a highly publicized panel, sponsored by one of their magazine professors, that featured writers whose work was included in a new anthology, “Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.” The anthology was the collaboration of award-winning longform journalists Walt Harrington and Mike Sager. Harrington had worked for The Washington Post Magazine, authored several books and now taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sager had worked at The Washington Post with Harrington years earlier before becoming a writer-at-large for Esquire magazine. He had authored several books and then founded his own publishing house, The Sager Group.

As Ralph and Demkiewicz listened to their tales of stories and career, they realized two things: All of the writers on the panel were men. Only three of the 19 writers featured in “Next Wave” were women.

That’s when Ralph and Demkiewicz experienced their own next wave of frustration. Apparently they weren’t alone. Demkiewicz says another female student in the crowd challenged Sager to explain why there were only three women in the anthology. As she remembers it, the room “got tense.” “It was like everyone in that room was thinking, ‘We’re just students; can we challenge something like this?’” Demkiewicz says.

Ralph and Demkiewicz texted each other from across the room with the same sentence: “We’re doing it.” By “it,” they meant creating a magazine that would carry the kind of stories they themselves aspired to write – longform narratives from a female perspective. After the panel, they approached Sager to express their frustration, and to declare their plans to create their own magazine. Ralph and Demkiewicz then walked down the street to a coffee shop and purchased the domain for their new WordPress site.

Sager remembers the encounter well – an encounter that would lead to its own surprising collaboration. “They said they were unhappy,” he says. “So I said do something, and they said that they would. And they actually did, as remarkable as that is.”

If The Riveter continues to succeed, it will be in the face of stubborn odds. Consider the VIDA Count, a research-driven organization that strives to increase critical attention to women’s writing and to build transparency around gender equality issues in literature, according to its website. According to the 2014 report, Harper’s reported more than double the bylines for men than women; The New Yorker recorded 457 bylines for men and 193 for women. The 2013 and 2012 reports mirrored the same trend.

Demkiewicz remembers looking around in one of her classes at the University of Missouri, where she and Ralph became friends. About 70 percent of her classmates were female, yet the 2012 American Society of Magazine Editors’ National Magazine Awards had just been announced, and no women had even been nominated in several high profile categories. “Maybe it’s dramatic or clichéd, but it’s kind of like every woman’s life flashed before my eyes, and I didn’t like what it looked like,” Demkiewicz says. “Why work so hard in an academic setting only to ‘disappear’ in a professional setting? I think there was a flash of despair and then an immediate refusal to continue to allow women to get so easily buried or pigeonholed. I was like, fuck this, I am not spending money on journalism school just to be faced with such archaic social and professional obstacles.”

The result of that refusal is The Riveter, which fills the space where “female is the norm,” while also breaking the mold of a traditional women’s magazine, Demkiewicz says.

Ralph and Demkiewicz’s quest comes with considerable sacrifice, the kind that required deferring their own individual goals. “As college seniors, we wanted to be writing for great publications,” Demkiewicz says. “We set that aside because we were so worried about women having to fit in a space in the industry that was so constricting.”

Byline disparities aside, The Riveter founders are also confronting their original question: Where do all the female journalists go? According to a September 2014 cover story in Nieman Reports, women held only 37.2 percent of journalism jobs in broadcast, print and online news medias in 2013. That’s less than a .5 percent increase since 1998, when women held 36.9 percent of jobs in journalism.

The gap The Riveter founders see in the profession they’ve chosen, however, was absent from their own childhoods. Ralph and Demkiewicz say they grew up with strong female role models and never questioned their right to follow their talent or their dreams.

Demkiewicz — executive editor of The Riveter — grew up in small-town Manchester, Iowa. As a child, she obsessed over her grandmother’s ‘power suits’ and, when her grandmother joined The World Food Prize, an international organization focused on world hunger, she imagined working within the capacity to help change the world for the better. Very early on, she imagined doing so through storytelling, in which she learned the value from her mother, an English teacher, and her father, a former radio DJ in Warsaw, Poland.

Ralph —the magazine’s editor-in-chief — grew up in Rockford, Illinois. Her father, a commercial real estate developer, and her mother, a teacher and project manager, raised their three daughters to take initiative, confront challenges and be leaders. Ralph was launching media outlets as far back as fifth-grade, when she started The Blue Pencil newspaper at her elementary school. For all her own accomplishments, Ralph, the eldest, says her two younger sisters “exude an unwavering confidence that I’m constantly in awe of.”

“It just never occurred to me growing up that it was exceptional for me to be in leadership roles because I was a girl,” Ralph says. “Nowadays there are initiatives to ‘ban bossy,’ etc., in order to encourage confidence in young girls, but I feel really lucky to have grown up in a ‘girls rule’ household where my goals and passions were taken in stride and celebrated as ‘the norm.’”

The Riveter's front women (left to right) Kaylen Ralph, Natalie Chang and Joanna Demkiewicz have beaten the early odds against start-ups, and are now focusing on a way to sustain those efforts.
Photo by Victoria Campbell

The women behind The Riveter will need that confidence and more as they go forward. Launching a print publication in today’s journalism climate is about as ambitious as you can get, says John Fennell, who teaches magazine journalism at Missouri and is one of Ralph’s former professors. “It is so costly and risky to implement a print product, so a lot of entrepreneurs start online to see if they can develop an audience,” Fennell says. “The Riveter has become a strong publication this way and have hit a niche market for young to middle-aged women.”

Fennell cites Ms. Magazine’s history of financial instability and advertiser resistance, and the failed Jane Magazine, which was designed for women 18-34 as an alternative to the typical women’s magazines and printed its last issue in August 2007. But in the unpredictable world of digital publishing, there are signs of hope. According to a December 2014 Storyboard piece first published in Nieman Reports, niche publications have been popping up over a wide array of topics and many are highlighting longform narrative as a key selling point.

The question is whether The Riveter will thrive as a niche publication for women readers or rise to the name recognition and circulation sizes of the Cosmos, Glamours and Marie Claires of the world, he says. “Every year I teach a magazine publishing class, women ask why isn’t there an Esquire-type publication for women,” Fennell says. “One doesn’t exist now, because in the large magazine circulation categories, there hasn’t been amarket. That’s why we’re seeing smaller efforts bloom in the form of niche publications.”

It’s tempting to draw a parallel to feminist magazines that have come before, such as Bitch, Bustle or Ms. Bitch magazine launched in 1996 and now operates as a nonprofit. It’s been known for its controversial cover pages and has the goal of pointing out the “insidious, everyday sexism of popular culture,” according to its website. Bustle is a venture-capital backed online magazine that launched in 2013, and broke 11 million monthly unique visitors last July. When founder Bryan Goldberg announced he was creating Bustle, he asked, “Isn’t it time for a women’s publication that puts world news and politics alongside beauty tips?” Bustle magazine interviewed The Riveter founders in 2013, when Ralph pointed out though the magazines are different; people draw similarities because they are both easily grouped together as “women’s magazines.”

The godmother of the genre is Ms. Magazine, founded in 1972 by, among others, feminist icon Gloria Steinem, as the first national magazine with the goal to make feminist voices audible. Mary Kay Blakely, one of Ms. Magazine’s original contributing writers and one of Demkiewicz’s former professors at Missouri, warns against lumping The Riveter with earlier or other feminist magazines. “It’s going to make an original mark on its generation,” she says, due to its “unique content.”

“When I first started writing for Ms. more than 30 years ago, it was thrilling to have a place where you can publish what you can’t publish anywhere else,” Blakely says of that time, when most women’s magazines were limited to advice about marriages, babies or cosmetics. “The Riveter is doing a very similar thing now, but they are defining feminism for their generation in a new way. The kind of work they’re publishing reflects that.”

And if this 21st century version of a women’s magazine is attempting to defy the either/or corners of content, so too does it reject the either/or restrictions of form and platform.

The magazine started as a WordPress site, but has since scrambled to find funding to establish its online and print presence. A growing network of contributors keep the online version updated daily. The magazine’s first two print issues included pieces long in content and also deep in analysis and research, Ralph says. Longform journalism doesn’t have to be long, she adds, but it does have to be complex and original in its reporting. “We don’t define longform as just word count. It’s also about level of research and depth,” Ralph says. “Though we started with a WordPress site, print has been our focus from the beginning. We believe longform is best enjoyed when you can touch and feel it on paper.”

Two years, two print issues and one successful Kickstarter campaign later, The Riveter is gaining traction.

After graduating from Missouri in 2013, Ralph and Demkiewicz launched the magazine using an Indigogo crowdfunding campaign to print (and sell out of) their first two issues. Through the campaign, they reached their goal of raising $2,000 by June 1, 2013. The following September, Ralph and Demkiewicz decided to move The Riveter, and themselves, to Minneapolis. “We knew we wanted The Riveter to be based in a city, and Minneapolis is an amazing place to be a women in a creative field,” says Ralph, who cited a study that lists Minneapolis as the fourth-best U.S. city for women entrepreneurs. “Women run the show in Minneapolis,” she says. “What a perfect setting for what we’re doing.”

Natalie Cheng, who graduated from the University of Missouri in May 2014 with both business and journalism degrees, had seen the initial Indiegogo campaign and was impressed by The Riveter’s online content. But she knew the magazine would soon need to develop a strong business side, so she reached out to the founders. She joined Ralph and Demkiewicz in Minneapolis that fall.

As chief executive officer, Cheng’s goal is to establish The Riveter as a multiplatform brand and a print quarterly. “We had put out two issues, but we’d been publishing when we had the time and the money,” Cheng says. “I felt it was time to make it a regular schedule and time to for us to say that The Riveter has really arrived.”

She quickly rejected the more traditional route of seeking venture capital funding: “With a traditional investment model, we would have to give up equity, which we didn’t want to yet as a small start up.” And instead of using the recent Kickstarter campaign as a one-time fundraiser, The Riveter team decided to use it as a combination fundraiser and subscription drive. “We weren’t saying, put faith in us so we can start something,” Cheng says. “We already had a product and we needed to maintain subscriptions to become a quarterly. The fact we did it was really validating.” The Kickstarter funds will be earmarked solely for printing costs and to pay contributors. Before Kickstarter, The Riveter paid only $75 to $100 for a longform print piece. It plans to up that to $300 to $500 per piece.

The three Riveter leaders draw no salaries at this point, but support their venture with day jobs: Cheng works by remote, managing social media and marketing for CopterShop, a consumer drone company based in Seattle; Ralph is a receptionist at a boutique salon in the Twin Cities; Demkiewicz handles publicity for a Minneapolis theatre/bowling alley/restaurant/bar, the Bryant-Lake Bowl. “I wake up, work on The Riveter, go to work, come home, work on The Riveter and go to bed,” Demkiewicz says. “We’re 100 percent ok with doing this as a labor of love for now, because we want to be sure we are always paying our writers and that we are getting our print issues out there and established.”

Despite the digital revolution, Ralph says readers are still drawn to The Riveter as a print product, whether they first discovered the magazine online or not. During the Kickstarter subscription campaign, 70 backers signed up for a digital product, while 482 backers requested variations of the print product for their support.

As is true for most publications, future revenue models are uncertain. The Riveter crew is developing a more interactive online product. For the print product, Cheng says, they hope to avoid “littering the publication with ads and distracting the reader,” and instead fund the magazine through a combination of corporate partnerships and subscriptions. “For now, we sustain The Riveter through sales of single copies and subscriptions,” Cheng says. “That won’t always be the case. Moving forward, we’re putting a lot of effort into monetizing our digital presence.”

For now, The Riveter women have plenty of passion and little expectation of big profits. But 10 years from now, Ralph says, the dream is for The Riveter to be a household name. “We’ve come a long way from drinking cider together and talking about The Riveter, and so has the magazine,” Ralph says. “We don’t see ourselves as a niche publication. We want to be on the same stands as big-name women’s magazines.”

Fennell, who was a newspaper and magazine writer and award-winning magazine editor before he joined the faculty at Missouri, says the work The Riveter women are doing is needed in the journalism industry. “With more women graduating college than men, isn’t it time for a magazine like this?” Fennell says.

Meanwhile, if you ask Ralph and Demkiewicz if they are still mad about the state of journalism for female writers, they say, “Hell, yes.” Then they point to The Riveter, and say with confidence that they believe in women journalists, they believe in each other, and they believe the industry is changing. And that they will be among the ones changing it.

In addition to their labor of love on the The Riveter, Demkiewicz and Ralph helped to write an anthology of female longform journalists titled, “Newswomen: Twenty-Five Years of Front Page Journalism,” which was recently published by The Sager Group, courtesy of Mike Sager, the Esquire writer who set them off so many months ago. Sager has announced plans to publish two additional anthologies of work by women journalists. “We’ve definitely struck a chord,” Ralph says. “People are really starting to be in tune now to the gender disparity in every industry. Longform journalism is no exception. We believe that we can change that. We believe in what we’re building and where we came from and where we’re going.”

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/the-riveter-longform-journalism-by-women-for-women/feed/023 Things I’ve Learned from (Not) Being a Columnisthttp://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/23-things-ive-learned-from-not-being-a-columnist/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/23-things-ive-learned-from-not-being-a-columnist/#commentsThu, 16 Jul 2015 18:30:44 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=120772Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich delivered the following remarks as the keynote speaker at the 2015 conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists in Indianapolis on June 26:

When I arrived at the Chicago Tribune in 1985 to work in the features department, the features editor sat me down and asked me how I envisioned my newspaper future.

“I’d like to write a column,” I chirped.

She snorted.

“Yeah,” she said, “you and everybody else.”

And that was the end of that dream.

Honestly? I wasn’t even sure what I meant when I said I wanted to write a column. What exactly is a columnist?

I didn’t want to be a columnist like the guys on the op-ed pages, who orated on national politics from the top of Mount Pundit. I didn’t envision myself writing the kind of column that romanticized hanging out with cops in bars. I didn’t want to be Dear Abby. I think I meant that I wanted to be able to reflect on what I care about—the big, messy sweep of life, from politics to the weather—and do it in language that felt natural to me.

The only columnist I knew who wrote the way I’d like to—the only one I felt spoke for me and to me—was Ellen Goodman. But at the time, she was a rare breed of columnist—a woman, a columnist who blended the public and the personal—and my editor had made it clear that columnist wasn’t in my near future, so I went about my business. Wrote features for a while. Spent five years covering the South as a national correspondent for the Tribune. Forgot that I wanted to be a columnist, whatever that was.

Then one night in Atlanta, my phone rang. Did I want to come back to Chicago and write a column on the Tribune’s Metro page?

Wow. A column. In Chicago. One of the great newspaper towns. Easy answer, right? I said I’d have to think about it.

I hesitated because columnists were supposed to be highly opinionated people. Kickass. When I was younger, I might have qualified. At 38, less so.

Covering news made me see how slippery and fragmented the truth could be. I’d go cover a big story and then read an opinion column by someone who hadn’t been there and I’d think, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Being a reporter made me wary of columnists. It taught me how much I didn’t know, couldn’t know.

So two days after I got the call, I called back and did what I had to do: I said yes. Because, really, who could say no to a column in the city of Chicago?

But I made a vow. Five years and I’d move on. No one could write a good column for longer than five years. That was in 1992. And more than ever today—23 years later, three columns most weeks—I ask myself: What is a newspaper columnist?

It can mean a Metro columnist. An op-ed columnist. A food columnist. A few years ago, the Pulitzer for criticism went to the L.A. Times car columnist. “Columnist” has always been a big tent of a word, but the definition seems even broader now. Blogs. Facebook. Online comment boards. Anybody with an Internet connection can be a columnist of sorts. In this new world, traditional columnists have to adapt.

It makes me happy that my column runs on page 3 of the printed Chicago Tribune. But these days I worry more about where it runs on our website, how often it’s tweeted or posted on Facebook. There’s more pressure than ever to write off the trending news, and not just of the day but of the hour. To peg your opinions to celebrities or national political figures. To be purely personal or outrageously partisan. None of this is new, but in a click-driven world, it is amplified and accelerated. It gets harder to be a generalist, to speak quietly, to think before you shout.

Every now and then I run into someone who says that the old-style Metro columnist—a person who sometimes offered opinions, who sometimes told stories, who used “I” but not all the time, who was there to reflect the life of a place—is almost extinct. Extinct or not, that’s the model I’ve followed, even as I try to figure out its place in the new order.

And I like to think that in these 23 years, I’ve learned a few things that apply to column writing of many kinds, in any age.

One thing I’ve learned? Making a list is a lazy way to write.

Another thing I’ve learned? People love lists.

So here are 23 things I’ve learned about column writing in the past 23 years.

1. You can only be who you are—I was never going to be Mike Royko and never tried—but you can sharpen who you are.John Carroll, the late, great L.A. Times and Baltimore Sun editor, once said that reporters tend to be explainers or indicters and that the best investigative teams pair the two. A lot of columnists are indicters. Some of us lean more toward the explainer type. Whichever one you are, it’s smart to push yourself to be a little more of the other.

2. Be analytical, practical, emotional.
When I took the column job, my first newspaper editor called me up and told me to keep that formula in mind: APE. It’s a good guideline, though he also, and less usefully, told me I should get a column photo of myself in a big hat.

3. Write what you glimpse out of the corner of your mind.
I could exhort you to speak your mind. So consider yourself exhorted. But what is really in your mind? That’s the hard part. Some of the best columns come when you can catch your fleeting reactions, can capture your subtle ideas and questions. It can help to ask yourself out loud: What I am REALLY thinking? And then listen.

4. No matter what you write, there will be people who love it and people who hate it. Only the ratio changes.

5. What readers love will often surprise you.
A while back, on a deadline day when my mind was blank—you know the feeling?—I wrote about seeing my first black squirrel. This column embarrassed me. It was so small. Well. It was a big hit online. I got hundreds of emails. To this day, people write me to say, “Are you that squirrel lady?” and to tell me their own black squirrel story.

6. When people hate on you, don’t take it personally.
You will take it personally. Your work and your name are personal. So you need coping techniques. Some columnists fight back by making videos or writing columns about their hate mail. My Tribune colleague Eric Zorn sometimes replies with an email that says, “Welcome to the Eric Zorn fan club.” One colleague once suggested that the best response was: “You may be right.” I hit the “Delete” button a lot.

7. Work to understand the world before you try to change it.
A lot of people go into journalism hoping to change the world. I think our first duty—as journalists, as columnists—is to try to understand the world and help others understand it.

8. (A corollary to 7.) Be a reporter.
A new reporter at the Tribune once asked me, “Were you ever a reporter?” I bristled. I still think of myself as a reporter, meaning I try to find stuff out. The first reason to write is to learn.

9. Be personal. But not too personal. And not too often.
Even political columnists are served by writing the occasional personal column. Write occasionally about your mother or the squirrels, and people will connect better with your more intellectual musings. But you know that friend who talks about herself all the time? Don’t be her.

10. When in doubt, go out.
How many times have you sat staring at your computer, unsure what to write? Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, as if the muse could be found on Facebook? Stand up. Go outside. Go cover something. Or just take a walk. You’ll think better afterward.

11. Try not to repeat yourself. You will repeat yourself.
Some days you’re writing and you have a shadowy thought: Have I written this before? If you think you did, you probably did. Check.

12. Remember that you’re in a long-term relationship with your readers.
Being outrageous and outraging may be part of who you are and why your readers love you. Insults may be important to your brand. But even then, be careful not to pointlessly—I emphasize pointlessly—alienate the people who care about what you write. You want them to come back.

13. Deadlines are a columnist’s best friend.
Without deadlines, some of us would never write. I remind myself of this painful truth with these two self-invented mantras: Panic is my muse. Deadlines crowd out doubt.

14. Stand for something, not just against.
It’s easy to rail against things. But are you prepared to offer a solution? To give voice to someone who is doing something to solve the problem?

15. You can’t have an opinion about everything.
Well, you can. You can’t have an informed, useful opinion about everything. It’s OK to shut up on some topics.

16. Find a niche.
Early in my career, a bigwig reporter told me, “Make yourself an expert in something.” Frankly, I never did, but I’ve come to appreciate the wisdom. Unless you’re, say, a brilliant satirist like Andy Borowitz, knowing a lot about one topic will serve you.

17. Use social media.
Self-promotion is a tricky art. To do it well, you need to be generous. Share other people’s work—selectively. Post photos. Be someone that other people want to be around.

18. Drinking while writing will not make your column better.

19. Prizes are like alcohol.
What columnist—what writer—doesn’t like a prize? Prizes can make you feel good for a little while, but the buzz doesn’t last.

20. Insecurity comes with the job.
You’ll always worry that you should be doing it differently, could be doing it better. That someone else is doing it better. Always.

21. Respect your readers.
Even when they make you mad—how could they misread your prose so thoroughly?—they are the reason you exist as a columnist.

22. If the phrase, “I have to write a column today” ever crosses your mind—and it will—change it to “I get to write a column today.”
Writing a column is a privilege, even when it hurts.

23. I am not a columnist.
You are not a columnist. No one IS a columnist. We write columns. It’s a function of who we are. It is not who we are. When the day comes that you’re not a columnist anymore, you’ll realize you never were. You were just a person who got to type out some thoughts on some things you cared about, who had the great privilege of some readers who cared enough to read them. Aren’t you lucky?

]]>http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/23-things-ive-learned-from-not-being-a-columnist/feed/0Peter Slevin tackles the biography of First Lady Michelle Obamahttp://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/peter-slevin-tackles-the-biography-of-first-lady-michelle-obama/
http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/peter-slevin-tackles-the-biography-of-first-lady-michelle-obama/#commentsMon, 29 Jun 2015 17:00:51 +0000http://niemanstoryboard.org/?post_type=storyboard-post&p=120738Editor’s Note: Anyone who writes about politics and politicians knows how difficult it is to bring fresh insight to familiar issues and personalities. That challenge is even greater if your subject is the most well-known woman in the United States, First Lady Michelle Obama. In this installment of “Writing the Book,” an occasional Storyboard feature in which journalists turned authors discuss their work, former Washington Post reporter Peter Slevin examines how he looked beyond the two-dimensional narrative to find meaningful material for his biography, “Michelle Obama: A Life.” The book was just named one of the year’s 10 best biographies by Booklist and you can read recent reviews here and here.

As I set out five years ago to write a biography of one of the most recognizable women on the planet, the first question was why do it. The second was how. Neither answer came easily.

Peter Slevin/Photo by Andrew Johnston.

I had written often about Michelle Obama as the Chicago correspondent for The Washington Post. During the 2008 campaign, I trailed her to Iowa, New York, Texas and a handful of other states. I interviewed her friends on the South Side and tracked her path through Princeton and Harvard and back to the neighborhoods of her youth, where she worked to unstack the deck for working class African Americans.

On the campaign trail, she spoke sharply and stirringly about inequality, not just in terms of race and gender, but class. She painted a winning portrait of the future president, of course, but she also discussed the world she inhabited as a black woman, as a mother, as a professional trying to keep all the balls in the air. Her message ran deeper than electoral politics.

Ever-expanding crowds swooned, but reaction to Michelle was often binary. Adore.Abhor. Respect. Reject. Warm, wise and embracing. Haughty, petty and disdainful. Her most fevered critics held up funhouse mirrors and called her angry, mean and unpatriotic. Mrs. Grievance declared one headline. Barack’s Bitter Half smirked another.Rush Limbaugh barely waited until she had reached the White House to mock her physical appearance. He labeled her Moochelle, or Mooch for short, a term that suggested a fat cow, perhaps, or a leech, and encompassed big government, the welfare state, big-spending Democrats, and black people living on the dole.

By the time Michelle took up residence in Washington in January 2009, the existing narratives – variously superficial and contradictory – seemed ubiquitous. Clearly, there was more to tell, but a full-length biography? She was the first African American woman to serve as first lady, yet she had no constitutional duties nor armies to command. She was not the one who had been elected president. As Laura Bush once said, it only takes the vote of one man to make a first lady. What I came to recognize, however, was that Michelle, occupied the spotlight in a way that none of her recent predecessors did. Methodically and purposefully, she turned to issues of fairness and equity that had always animated her.

As I watched, I also realized that no writer had put the pieces together, nor had anyone told Michelle Obama’s story against the complex history she was living as a member of the first generation to come of age after the civil rights era. I sometimes wonder if the outlines of Michelle’s story emerged more clearly because I was watching from Chicago, far removed from bluster and scorekeeping that so often defines Washington politics and its chroniclers. It surely helped that I had no beat to cover. By late 2010, the Post had closed the last of its national bureaus and I was teaching at Northwestern University.

But where to start, on a project that would take nearly five years from concept to publication? My goal was to write a thoughtful and thorough book – and an enduring one. I wanted it to be rich with the voices of the people who knew Michelle, with my own voice most definitely quieter than the rest. With a formal assurance from the East Wing of the White House that I would have access to Michelle’s lieutenants, I did a round or two of interviews in Washington, then started in Chicago, where the book is anchored.

For guidance, I first looked to Michelle’s own words about where she drew her lessons. She said her role models were people she knew and she often spoke of her late father, “the voice in my head that keeps me whole and keeps me grounded.” So, who was Fraser C. Robinson III? I rang the bell at the Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in search of one of his cousins, Rabbi Capers C. Funnye Jr. After hearing me out, Funnye shared stories and led me to one of Fraser’s brothers, Nomenee Robinson, a Harvard Business School graduate working in the Chicago office of the Peace Corps. Robinson, in due course, told me where I could find one of his younger brothers on a Saturday morning.

I found a DuSable High alum who pointed me to one of Fraser’s classmates. The classmate had a 1953 yearbook with a full-page photograph showing Fraser working on a sculpture. Although he would spend his professional life tending boilers at a Chicago plant, I learned that he had attended classes at the Art Institute of Chicago as a boy. He studied there at roughly the same time as Richard Hunt, who became a noted sculptor. I visited Hunt at his gloriously cluttered studio to learn what it meant to be an African-American youngster traveling across town to art classes.

As my work progressed, a DuSable contact called to invite me to a school reception and reported that two of Michelle’s relatives were expected. At a senior living facility, I located the minister who presided over Fraser’s funeral, and I found a Chicago phone number for Barack Obama’s great uncle. At the Harvard law library, an archivist handed me a mimeographed 1988 student newsletter with a long, revealing essay by Michelle Robinson about the need to reduce racism and sexism at the law school. By tracking comment boards about Michelle’s basketball-coach brother, I found Dan Maxime, a water plant colleague and friend of Fraser’s who had retired to Las Vegas. And as my deadline approached, I drove to a barber shop on Chicago’s South Side, where Krsna Golden, a former mentee of Michelle’s, was cutting hair.

This was the satisfying and familiar work of street reporting that I had loved for 30-odd years as a newsman. Finding people who had something to say and searching for common ground. It was like writing a newspaper profile, except about 130,000 words longer. In asking individuals to trust me, I described my purposes and ambitions and offered to answer questions. I promised transparency but not anonymity. (In the finished book, there are more than 1,200 endnotes and no blind quotes.) The outreach to prospective sources seemed endless, and it did not always bear fruit, but it forced me to crystallize my thinking. What was it again that I was hoping to accomplish? Where, exactly, did this person fit into the narrative? What was the most valuable question I could ask?

Any project this ambitious encounters unexpected obstacles great and small. When I was well underway, East Wing chief of staff Tina Tchen reneged on her predecessor’s pledge of access, making it more difficult to interview people who knew the first lady, including sources otherwise happy to share an anecdote or detail about a woman they admired. Some honored Tchen’s dictum, others did not.

It was a setback, but by the time I pressed the button for the last time, I had interviewed scores of people, from all corners of Michelle’s life – friends, relatives, professors, mentors, colleagues, aides and campaign strategists. I drew on my own pre-White House interviews with the Obamas and studied hundreds of thousands of words that Michelle has spoken in public. It also helped that generous colleagues shared unpublished interviews with Michelle and her mother, Marian Robinson.

I often did not know exactly what I had or what I needed until I sat down to write a particular passage. Perhaps congenitally, I could not stop reporting. Two months before the book came out in April 2015, I was still adding details. (Thank you, Knopf.) Just as with shorter-form writing, individual figures and the surrounding landscape gradually came together, sometimes in ways I could not have foreseen.

Two things were at work, it seems to me. One was the sparkling stash of details that emerged from the digging, the reading and the interviews. The other was the accumulated time to make sense of what I had. The time, in other words, to think.

One question led to another, one interview to another, one bit of reasoning to a deeper bit of reasoning and, slowly, some conclusions. The happiest stroke of fortune, and perhaps the least predictable, was happening upon a puzzle with enough great characters and enough complexity that I never grew tired of trying to solve it.

Peter Slevin spent a decade on the national staff of The Washington Post before joining Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where he is an associate professor. He has written extensively about Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as political campaigns and policy debates from one end of the country to the other. Slevin graduated from Princeton and Oxford. He lives with his family in Evanston, Illinois.